Organizational Level Marketing

What happens when you have bad customer support? Do you’re clients leave? I’m sure they do, if they have a choice in going to your competitors. In the same way, there’s a lot of companies out there that don’t even know that they are losing tons of business because they just don’t do organizational level marketing.

What do I mean by organizational level marketing? Am I talking about marketing to your employees on the products and services you sell, so you can convert them into customers? NO! I’m talking about the ability for a company to actually take some time and train their employees on what the company truly represents, so that they represent it correctly when they are talking to the outside world.

Lets face it, you only get one chance for anyone who walks in, calls in or writes you an email.

What do you have to do?

What you have to do is get the buy-in from the entire organization on why marketing to potential clients/customers is important. They have to be willing to make adjustments and changes. You’re most likely a small business and you’re thinking that this has no impact on you, right? Wrong! Even if you answer the phones, you have to stick to this, even if you’re having a bad day and some client yelled at you for 2 hours, even when they are wrong. If you are a medium size business, you still have to get the buy-in from your VPs or your other managers running different departments. Everything has to come from Top-Down. If you don’t practice what you preach, then there is no way that the other managers or even your staff will care to make these buy-ins and changes that need to be made.

How do you get this magical buy-in?

This will be a complete growing and changing process. This is really more of a psychological process than just a straightforward marketing process. You are asking people to change, and anytime you make changes you have to appeal the reptilian side of the brain. For example, you make a change because you have this gut feeling. Appealing to yourself, your managers & your staff is going to require you to tell them and move their minds. You as a leader need to drive your organization and truly lead your business. I would highly recommend a book called “Start with Why”, by Simon Sinek, it really talks about web ideas, but you can apply these same principles to your organizational level strategy.

What Does Everyone Need to Learn/Understand?

Brand Values

Your managers, team members and even you have to have to know what your company values are. What are the 3 to 5 things that your brand represents? It doesn’t help if it’s just sitting on your website. You truly have to have it burned into the organization. People have to feel these values and truly believe in them or you’re really not going to be doing any justice to your internal marketing strategy. This is also where HR can help you. If you don’t have an HR department, then it’s just all you.

Mission & Vision

There are a lot of companies that just have this up on their site. Okay there are millions!! They just throw this up and don’t even know what it is! Think of this like steering a ship. The mission & vision help you with your overall goals of the company. It makes a huge difference if everyone in your company know what they are.

Making these things Tangible

In fact, I’ve had a company make a poster that is on the main entrance of the door with the brand values & mission and vision statements on there. Every person that walked into the door was required to make a tap on the poster and anyone who didn’t had to drop a dollar in the jar, this made it tangible and make everyone aware of what the company values are. They need to know that these things mean something to everyone and aren’t just empty words. When they become empty words, just think of it like driving a car without anyone in the drivers seat, you will crash at some point.

Will This Change Everything?

There is a possibility, but possibly not, this is only a small step that needs to be taken when you actually start this process. The other things that need to be heavily looked at are your reputation management & communication strategies.